Description
This book re-examines the role of the sublime across a range of disparate cultural texts, from architecture and art, to literature, digital technology, and film, detailing a worrying trend towards nostalgia and arguing that, although the sublime has the potential to be the most powerful uniting aesthetic force, it currently spreads fear, violence, and retrospection. In exploring contemporary culture, this book touches on the role of architecture to provoke feelings of sublimity, the role of art in the aftermath of destructive events, literature’s establishment of the historical moment as a point of sublime transformation and change, and the place of nostalgia and the returning of past practices in digital culture from gaming to popular cinema.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Jump Number Ten
Introduction: Theorizing the Sublime
Part 1: Sublime Terror and Violence in the 21st Century
1: 9/11, Sublimity, Ruination, and the War over Architecture
The violence of Sublime Architecture
A Terrifying Nostalgia
2: the Stockhausen Syndrome & the Role of Art, Image, and Spectacle in an Age of Terror
Icarus
Attention Deficit Disorder: Contemporary Terror Attacks and Spectacle
3: The Sublime Moment in Contemporary Literature and the Nostalgia for a Lost Innocence
Foregrounding the Moment of Terror in Literature
In Search of a Lost Innocence
Part 2: The Sublime in the Digital Age and Nostalgia for the Real
4: Digital Nostalgia and the Sublime Utopias of Cyber-Space
Cyber-Utopia
Digital-Dystopia
Retro Gaming: Nostalgia and the Celebration of the Pixel
5: Sublime Special Effects in Contemporary Cinema and Nostalgia for Physical
and Mechanical Special Effects
Remaking the Past
An Uncanny Nostalgia for the Real
"Staring into those Black Eyes": Jaws and Nostalgia for the Mechanical Sublime
Conclusion: "Show me the Way to go Home": Sublime Apathy and Nostalgia
Bibliography
Index
